Product Description

Can you write a novel in a year? If you simply sit back and think about the enormity of writing a book, it will seem like a vast and unconquerable task, impossibly daunting. The way to make it less daunting is to break it down into its constituent parts, to do it bit by bit. Over the chapters herein, different aspects of technique are divided up into bite size chunks, the better to aid digestion. The book will look at different aspects of writing, with set exercises to help the reader along in their confidence and technique. It is designed to be read a chapter a week, with the aim of the fledgling writer having a body of material at the year's end which should form a solid start to their novel. Deeply practical, with sound advice at every stage, A NOVEL IN A YEAR is essential reading for any would-be novelist.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1728123 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-07
• Format: Import
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Louise Doughty is the author of five novels, CRAZY PAVING, DANCE WITH ME, HONEY-DEW, FIRES IN THE DARK and STONE CRADLE. CRAZY PAVING was shortlisted for four awards including the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize and FIRES IN THE DARK won awards from the Arts Council of England and the K.Blundell Trust. She is also a recipient of an Ian St. James prize and a Radio Times Drama Award. She has written five plays for radio and worked widely as a journalist and broadcaster in London, where she lives.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION

In 2001, I presented a radio series for the BBC World Service called Writers' Workshop. Each week, I talked to two guests. We discussed their work and how they went about it, and at the end I asked them to give me their one, essential piece of advice for aspiring writers. Robert McKee talked about screenwriting and advised people to read his books on the subject. Martin Amis appeared on the episode about memoir and suggested, with great tact, that would-be memoirists should, perhaps, have a little think about whether their lives were really interesting to other people. A radio dramatist talked movingly about a problem common to all writers whatever genre they work in, however famous or obscure they might be: the negative voices in one's head, the ones that whisper, this is rubbish. No one would want to read this. Who do you think you are?

My favourite piece of advice, however, came from the Australian novelist Elliot Perlman. What would he say to anyone who wanted to write a novel? He paused, then replied firmly, 'Think what you are prepared to sacrifice.'

Think what you are prepared to sacrifice. A year might be the least of it. When I decided I wanted to be a writer, one of the first people I told was the friendly, bearded man who ran my local second-hand bookshop. 'Not another book,' he groaned, gesturing around his premises, which overflowed with titles shelved and tumbling, piled high on the windowsills and on the wooden floor. 'The world is full of books. Why on earth do you want to add to them?'

'I want to make something beautiful that will give people pleasure,' I replied (I was young at the time).

'Plant a rose garden.'

Think what you are prepared to sacrifice. Writing a novel takes many, many hours, and those are hours you could spend planting roses, raising children, earning money - or even just having a nice life. What, in your life, is going to disappear, to allow you the time to write a book?

Throughout 2006, I wrote a column for the Daily Telegraph entitled'Novel in a Year'. The title was gimmicky but the theory behind itcompletely serious. Can you write a novel in a year? Well, it depends onhow long it is, how much time you have available, how talented you areetc., etc...In the feature that started the column, I was careful toexplain that for many new writers three years was probably a morerealistic estimate. I hoped that readers who decided to follow thecolumn would enter into the year-long process in the spirit I intended,not seriously believing that if they followed my advice they would endup with a finished book but that they would get some idea of the processes involved and enough raw material that might one day be shapeable into a first draft. I also thought that if serious would-be novelists hadn't embarked on a book before and wanted to set themselves an aim, it was reasonable to suggest that they say to themselves, for this calendar year I will sacrifice x and y, and then see where I am. Many would not complete an entire manuscript in that time, but most would - I hoped - discover whether or not they might be able to do it at all, if they set aside enough time to try.

A year also struck me as a good amount of time to allow myself to talk through the many complexities of writing, to set exercises for readers to follow and to report back on the results. Aspects-of-literature columns had been done before but had been essentially literary criticism examiningestablished, often great writers, not nuts and bolts guides for therelative novice. Whenever I teach on creative writing courses, I amalways banging on about nuts and bolts - ways of structuring a plot, thedifference between simile and metaphor, the usefulness of sucking mintsat your desk instead of stopping to make a sandwich. In contrast to manyof my fellow novelists, my attitude to writing is pretty nerdy. I likethe practical stuff, and I love talking about it. So, why did you writethat in the present tense...? You mean you never use flashbacks? Yes,what is it that is so satisfying about writing prologues and epilogues?

Each week in the column, I took a different aspect of writing and thengot readers to write examples of the issue or bit of technique inquestion and send them to me, so I could comment. The idea was that,week by week, the material would build towards a book. I also persuadedthe Telegraph to set up a special section of their website,www.telegraph.co.uk/novelinayear, so that people could log on and post their writing on a message board and their fellow writers could alsopass comment. Much as I would have enjoyed rabbiting on for a year, giving readers week after week of my little aperçus, that sort of advice was already widely available in a plethora of how-to books. What I was interested in was charting writers' progress over a year and encouragingthem to stick with it for that period.

When I first suggested the idea of such a column to Sam Leith, Literary Editor of the Telegraph, we met for coffee to talk it through. I hadn't dealt with Sam before but he had been recommended to me by journalist friends as friendly and approachable. He was new in his job at the time, so I guessed, correctly, that he had not yet learned to be snotty to writers who came to him with proposals. (Still hasn't, bless him.)

My only hesitation is,' he said, lighting a cigarette, 'can it really be true that nobody has done a column like this before?'

I had another concern. 'What if nobody writes in?' I said. 'Maybe I'll have to make it up, so I have something to write about the following week.'

'Have you got it all planned out?' he asked.

'Mmm...' I murmured, nodding, fingers firmly crossed beneath the table. The truth was, I had planned nothing beyond the first couple of columns. I had no idea what sort of response I would get.

The first exercise was very simple and designed to entice people in. It consisted of no more than completing the following sentence: 'The day after my eighth birthday my father told me...' (In coming up with the exercises, there was a tricky balance to strike. I wanted to encourage those who had never written a single word of fiction while keeping the column serious for the more experienced. The solution I came up with was to keep the exercises extremely simple for the first few weeks, then make them progressively more difficult.) When it appeared, I anxiously checked the 'Novel in a Year' website to see if anyone had responded, only to find that there was a problem with the link through from my feature to the message board. I eventually managed to get through myself by a roundabout route but thought that as it was so convoluted I couldn't expect any responses that weekend. It would have to wait until Monday when the technical glitch could be sorted out. Maybe no one would respond for a week or two anyway. Maybe all the would-be writers out there were still nursing their New Year hangovers.

It was Sunday lunchtime when my partner wandered into the kitchen andsaid, 'Take a look at the message board.' No less than 162 writers hadwriggled their way through the labyrinthine processes involved to posttheir 'The day after my eighth birthday...' sentences. To put this inperspective, under normal circumstances, a dozen letters to a columnistis considered a deluge.

By the end of the following day, we were in the high hundreds, and by the time I had to set the next exercise, 1808 people had responded and two bags of post had arrived. As I write this, in January 2007, there are 3174 responses on the 'Novel in a Year' message board to the first exercise alone.

After the initial flurry of interest the responses, counting post andmessages, settled down to anything between 300 and 1000 per exercise. As a rule, there were fewer responses when I set an exercise that was technically difficult or involved a high degree of invention, and manymore when I encouraged writers to post something autobiographical. Thiswas only to be expected. The letters I received made it clear that thewriters responding were everything from octogenarians who had never written a word before to people who had already completed several full-length manuscripts. The overall impression I received was of a vast and varied writing community - and I was determined that the complete newcomers should feel as welcome as the more experienced.

The lead-time of the Telegraph's books section meant it wasn't possible to set an exercise every week. I wrote the column on a Monday for the following Saturday, so there was no time for letters from those who responded to the previous Saturday's column to reach me via the Telegraph. I set one each fortnight, with the alternate columns being opportunities for me to talk about aspects of writing which did not readily lend themselves to exercises, of which there were plenty. This confused some followers of the column, and occasionally confused me too, but it meant that my fifty-two columns included only twenty-six exercises, which considering the collective nervous breakdown the response level gave the Telegraph's website department was possibly no bad thing. As well as moderating the site, they had to vet all contributions for libel or any other sort of illegality in the same way as if they were appearing in the newspaper. Stern 'terms and conditions' included the edict that they would not post anything 'obscene, defamatory or meaningless'.Meaningless? I thought. This is novelists we are talking about here.

The column was also syndicated in the Sunday Independent in Ireland, whose readers added to the Telegraph's website - although when it came to the Italian version, in Internazionale magazine, a separate Italian website had to be set up and a translator hired to scour it for examples of writing comparable to the ones I quoted in the English version. At one point, there was talk of syndicating the column in Canada, Australia and India as well, but negotiations stalled at the impracticality of managing the responses.

After the 'The day after my eighth birthday' exercise, I set a series ofthree further exercises encoura...

Customer Reviews

A loosely-structured approach
This book is a collection of weekly columns published in the Telegraph (UK) throughout 2006. At the time of writing this review the columns are still available to read on that newspaper's website. I was unaware of this when I bought the book and confess that I felt a bit grumpy at having shelled out for material I could have downloaded or printed off for free.
Anyway, leaving my chagrin aside, I began to read. The bones of the book are a series of exercises - 26 in all, one per fortnight. The intervening chapters contain advice from the author on the topic being covered, anecdotes from her own writing life and examples of the results of the exercises, selected from the many posted throughout 2006 to message boards (still viewable) on the website.
Exercises 1-8 are `idea-generating' and aim at simply assembling some material to work with. The writing subjects are unrelated to each other so you may end up with a random assemblage. The theory is that this should help you figure out roughly what you want to write about.
Exercise 9 asks you to summarise succinctly the plot of your novel.
Doughty then tells you to clear the decks for a ten-week intensive writing onslaught centred, in exercises 10-15, weeks 20 to 30, on your main character. You write a CV for her, create scenes where she is under stress, show what she wants from life and how she overcomes obstacles. I felt that this was the most focussed part of the book. It's also familiar territory if you've read these kinds of books before.
The later exercises cover technique. At this point, the author's sense of direction seemed to waver. `Some of the exercises that follow may prompt you to write episodes of your novel but it is important that you are also working on your book independently of the exercises...' she says. I found that rather confusing.
Doughty calls her own approach `disorganised' and `oblique'. If you dislike the idea of meticulous outlines or lengthy lists of character attributes you might find her approach refreshing. `Often, the only way to discover what happens next is to start writing and see what comes' she says.
For me, only time will tell whether this book will be useful in my quest to Finally Sit Down And Write the Novel. In the meantime I'll award it four stars and the benefit of the doubt. I also own `the Weekend Novelist' by Robert J. Ray, which also uses the time-frame of a year but takes a much more meticulously structured approach. I'm hoping the two together may be a winning combination.

Another writing exercise book
I've now read at least thirty of these. It seems to be a money spinner for poor authors. Each chapter gives you a pep talk and a writing exercise, with some favourite quotes mixed in. You usually find some interesting quote on one or two pages, and attempt some of the exercises. I have a faint suspicion that the exercises are standard in every writing course, and are simply served up here with garnish to pay for said course.

Engaging and Inspiring
These days writing a novel is not a short-term goal of mine, but it never falls completely out of the realm of possibilities (in a long-range dream list). Sometimes when I read a novel that particularly moves me, I get a burst of inspiration and write a few pages of fiction, but lately I'm content reading, writing reviews of the books I enjoy, and updating my blog on a semi-regular basis.

First let me clarify, as the author does in the introduction, that completing the exercises in this book will not necessarily help you create A Novel in a Year: From First Page to Last in 52 Weeks. However Louise Doughty's intention is that if you indeed participate in each of the exercises throughout the year, you will definitely have a work in progress, as well as the good habits needed to continue the work needed to complete a novel.

In fact, she says that if you complete the exercises in this book, that will help you get started, gather material, make notes and plan, and writes some scenes. Your second year may be full of despair and doubt, where you put it aside and wonder if you are wasting your time. If you stick with it, the third year is where the real work of rewriting and honing will take place.

In addition to the big picture and encouraging essays about the process, there are 26 exercises meant to be completed every other week. These exercises guide you to use your experiences as a stepping-off place for fiction, and help you with character-development and editing your work-in-progress.